Abstract

In many scientific domains, researchers depend on a timely and
efficient access to available publications in their particular
area. The increasing availability of publications in electronic
form via digital libraries is a reaction to this need. A remaining
problem is the fact that the pool of all available publications is
distributed between different libraries. In order to increase the
availability of information, these different libraries should be
linked in such a way, that all the information is available via
any one of them. Peer-to-peer technologies provide sophisticated
solutions for this kind of loose integration of information
sources. In our work, we consider digital libraries that organize
documents according to a dedicated classification hierarchy or
provide access to information on the basis of a thesaurus. These
kinds of access mechanisms have proven to increase the retrieval
result and are therefore widely used. On the other hand, this
causes new problems as different sources will use different
classifications and thesauri to organize information. This means,
that we have to be able to mediate between these different
structures. Integrating this mediation into the information
retrieval process is a problem that to the best of our knowledge
has not been addressed before.